By Chris Powell
While he already had signed Connecticut’s Juneteenth holiday legislation the previous month, Governor Lamont went to New London last Friday to sign the legislation again more ceremonially alongside the replica of the ship Amistad, which was visiting the city.
This allowed the ceremony to evoke not only the end of slavery in Texas in 1865, as Juneteenth does, but also the slave revolt that took place on board the ship in 1839, beginning a legal controversy that struck a blow for liberty, a controversy in which Connecticut people played a heroic part.
But at bottom the Amistad’s availability for the re-signing of the Juneteenth legislation was just a fortunate distraction for many of the celebrants, including state and municipal officials. That’s because most Connecticut residents who are descendants of slaves kidnapped from Africa live not in or near New London but in or near Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, which might have been distressingly ironic locations for the ceremony.
For within a few hours on either side of the ceremony there were the usual fatal shootings in Hartford and Bridgeport and in New Haven a 16-year-old boy was wounded in a drive-by shooting but survived.
Also meanwhile in New Haven the school system was holding a conference on reading instruction, partly in response to the collapse of student reading scores in the city, where for years most students have not been able to read at grade level.
Chronic student absenteeism and lack of parenting are big parts of that problem and afflict schools not just in New Haven but in Hartford and Bridgeport as well.
New Haven school officials had invited the press to attend the conference but after it began they expelled the New Haven Independent’s correspondent so that potential disagreement between teachers and administrators about instructional techniques wouldn’t be disclosed.
Yet they still call it public education.
Back at the ceremony in New London, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz declared, “Today we’re here to recognize the trauma of our African-American community and to start in a small way to correct the wrongs of our past.”
[ITALICS] Start [END ITALICS] to correct the wrongs of our past?
From the 13th Amendment and the Freedmen’s Bureau at the end of the Civil War to the civil rights and voting rights laws and “war on poverty” of more recent decades, the country was trying, at spectacular expense, to correct the wrongs of the past long before anyone thought of making Juneteenth an official holiday on top of Martin Luther King Day.
Of course much progress has been made during this century and a half, but given Connecticut’s enduring racial disparities — in educational achievement, housing, integration, crime, poverty, and public health — overall conditions in the places where most of the state’s descendants of slaves live seem to have worsened in important respects in recent years despite the huge amounts that have been spent in the name of improvement.
This makes the official Juneteenth holiday look mainly like a strategic distraction from failure and government’s chronic refusal to audit and address it.
After all, what will the Juneteenth holiday do about all those disparities?
What will Juneteenth accomplish besides what probably will become another paid day off for government’s own employees and another day for city residents to endure reduced or more expensive public services?
What will come from the additional righteous posturing by elected officials who, under cover of Juneteenth, can keep overlooking those disparities and failures and evading the underlying causes in government policies that, while comfortably employing so many politically connected people, don’t achieve their nominal objectives?
In New London Governor Lamont said some people “want to airbrush our history.” This was a misleading reference to those who object not to an honest teaching of history and the long struggle to democratize society but to educators and curriculums depicting the United States as a hopelessly racist country instead of one striving, however imperfectly, to live up to its founding principles.
The governor’s traveling to New London for a second signing of the Juneteenth holiday legislation served mainly to airbrush Connecticut’s [ITALICS] present. [END ITALICS] More holidays may make politicians feel good but they won’t change anything.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 